Handbook Bibliometrics

Rafael Ball

• Publisher: De Gruyter Saur
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110642599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bibliometrics and altmetrics are increasingly becoming the focus of interest in the context of research evaluation. The Handbook Bibliometrics provides a comprehensive introduction to quantifying scientific output in addition to a historical derivation, individual indicators, institutions, application perspectives and data bases. Furthermore, application scenarios, training and qualification on bibliometrics and their implications are considered.

1 History and Institutionalization of Bibliometrics

1.1 A Historical Overview of Bibliometrics

Farshid Danesh

Ali Mardani-Nejad

Abstract

Bibliometrics is one of the few methods that analyze data on a large scale. The development and growth of bibliometrics as an area of research have been remarkable in recent decades. However, bibliometrics is not a new phenomenon as it originated from statistical bibliography. The primary purpose of this chapter is to present a historical view of bibliometrics as well as the significant events that took place in this field from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century (1870 – 1980). The chapter will explore 116 years to illustrate the advent of bibliometrics, its essential definitions, its pioneers, its theories, and the influential works of this field, from 1873 to the end of 1989.

Keywords: bibliometrics, bibliometrics trend, bibliometric rule, bibliometric theories.

Introduction

As a word, bibliometrics appears to have its roots in “Biblio” and “metric.” The term “Biblio” derived from the combined Latin and Greek word “biblion,” which is similar to the word Bybel (os), meaning book. Paper derived from the word Byblos, a city of Phoenicia, noted for its export trade in the paper. The word “metrics,” on the other hand, indicates the science of measurement, and is derived either from the Latin or Greek word “metricus” or “metrikos,” each respectively meaning measurement (Sengupta, 1992). The metric word also specifies the science of measurement, derived from the Greek or Latin word metric, meaning measurement. In this chapter, the historical background of bibliometrics from origin to the formation of theories studied, and the foundations, thoughts, rules, and publications during the eighteen and nineteenth centuries in bibliometrics, is introduced. This historical overview dates back to the early 1870s when the initial idea of bibliometrics was sparked into life in 1873 and progresses to the late 1980s when it matured. This chapter will focus on the first significant bibliometrics events from the 1870s, which lasted more than a century until the end of the 1980s.

The 1870s

1873: The first bibliometrics documentary, entitled “Histoire des Sciences et des Savants Depuis Deux Siècles,” was published by French-Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle in 1873. He described the changes made in the scientific ability of nations in terms of their membership in scientific communities. His goal in this study was to identify the factors influencing the scientific success of a nation (van Raan, 2004).

Fig. 1

The 1890s

1896: Conceptual bibliometrics derived from statistical bibliography and its application dates back to the 1890s. The work of Campbell (1896), which uses statistical methods to study the subject scattering in publications, may be considered as the first attempt in bibliometrics studies (Osareh, 1996).

1896: Pareto, the Italian economist (University of Lausanne), recognized the 80/20 principle in 1896. In a paper entitled “Cours d’économie politique,” he published on this principle. Pareto believed that approximately 80 % of the land in Italy was owned by 20 % of the population (Moore, 1897). He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied (Backhaus, 1980).

The 1910s

1913: German physicist Felix Auerbach presented German cities’ population ranking according to the distribution law. The law that we now refer to as “Zipf’s Law” was founded in those years (Auerbach, 1913).

1916: French stenographer J.B. Estoup noted that rank (r) and frequency (F) in a French text were related by a “hyperbolic” law, which states that r ・ F is approximately constant, cf. (Estoup as cited in Harremoës and Topsoe, 2005).

1917: Cole and Eales used a statistical bibliography in 1917 to study citations of comparative anatomical texts from 1550 to 1860 (Cole and Eales, 1917).

The 1920s

1923: Hulme performed a statistical analysis of science history in 1923. His analysis was based on journals that had reached the International Bookkeeping Directory in 17 disciplines. Hulme was the first to invent the term “statistical bibliography” (Hulme, 1923).

1926: Lotka provided a basis for the scientific productivity of the authors. Lotka believed that few authors produce a high percentage of scientific works in scientific subjects. Of course, this does not necessarily reflect the impact and content of these authors’ publications (Lotka, 1926; Garfield, 1995).

Fig. 2

1927: Gross and Gross also used the citation analysis method for the first time. They used previous periodicals as sources of chemistry citations. Their citation analysis method as a model and sample was used up to 50 years later (Gross and Gross, 1927).

1928: E. Condon, a physicist from the Bell Telephone Company, found regularity in the research on raising the capacity of telephone lines for communication. Condon found that the distribution relationship between lgr & lgnr is close to a straight line AB, with an angle α between line AB and the χ-coordinate. If tgα=γ, then log (rγ • nr) = log K (Qiu et al., 2017).

1929: Zipf defended his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Relative Frequency as a determinant of phonetic change” (Zipf, 1929).

The 1930s

1932: Zipf published a book entitled Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language (Zipf, 1932).

1934: Bradford published his articles on scientific journals. He reported that a relatively small number of journals published a high percentage of all papers. Bradford divided journals into two groups: (1) a central core of the journals with their most relevant articles; and (2) several groups around the core (Bradford, 1948).

1934: Paul Otlet, the Belgian librarian, was one of a few people called the Father of Information Science. He added “DOCUMENTATION” to the field of information science, while the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) was another of his achievements. He also used the term bibliometrics for the first time in the Traité de Documentation book (Rousseau, 2014).

1935: In a book entitled The Psychobiology of Language: An Introduction to Dynamic Philology, Zipf stated that the word length is inverse with its relative frequency. This exploration led to the discovery of a law known as Zipf’s law, which, in his opinion, and in general, tends to be based on the size of the words, which has an inverse (not necessarily proportional) relation to the number of occurrences (Zipf, 1935).

The 1940s

1948: Herman Fussler characterized the literature of chemistry and physics, the use of “key journals” (Fussler, 1949).

Fig. 3

1948: Samuel C. Bradford published “Documentation” in 1948 (Bradford, 1948).

1948: In 1948, Claude Elwood Shannon presented an article entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which had a striking effect on information science. In this paper, he considers the fundamental problem of communication in reproducing the message sent by the sender to the receiver (Shannon, 1948).

1948: The term “librametrics” was first introduced by Siyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (S.R.R.) in 1948 at the annual Slip Conference in Spain (Ranganathan, 1948).

1949: Zipf made the first attempt at vocabulary within the text. By studying the abundance of words used in English texts, Zipf found some examples of the principle of least effort (Zipf, 1949).

The 1950s

1955: Eugene Garfield devised a bibliographic system for scientific texts called the “Science Citation Index.” The citation index scheme compiled information that was more convenient than the conventional index called “subject index” and could bridge the gap between authors and researchers (Garfield, 1955).

1956: Fano and Kessler introduced the first idea of the bibliographic coupling. The “Bibliographic couple” is one of the bibliometric methods that examine the critical works of authors, documents, and prestigious journals and identifies the relationship...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 History and Institutionalization of Bibliometrics
• 2 Theory, Principles and Methods of Bibliometrics
• 3 (Classical) Indicators
• 4 Alternative Metrics (Altmetrics)
• 5 Applications, Practice and Special Issues in Bibliometrics
• 6 The Data Basis in Bibliometrics
• 7 Teaching and Training
• 8 The Future of Bibliometrics
• List of Contributors
• Index